Art and Politics and URL
May 18, 2006 8:26 AM   Subscribe

 
"The acknowledged incompleteness implied by "if only" situates these texts somewhere between a guilty confession, a plea of desperation, and an ideological strategy session. The texts set for themselves the task of neutralizing the "problems" - the dislocated and potentially antagonistic groups engendered by the free market - that threaten the realization of the utopian ideal, implicitly embodied by the owners of capital." -Yates Mckee
posted by anotherpanacea at 8:27 AM on May 18, 2006


It's a nice little concept with a some visual and conceptual punch, but frankly it seems like kind of a one trick pony. Okay, I get it, Global Capitalism is BAD. What exactly is the alternative being promoted, though? Democratic socialism? Marxist revolution? Like, maybe the generic disposition of things is that life sucks because people suck. We're greedy and lazy and we can't bring ourselves to really care about someone we've never met, and whether your system is capitalism or communism, democracy or theocracy or plutocracy, it ends up pretty much sucking for most people and totally sucking for some people and being just ridiculously, egregiously rewarding for a few... who are nevertheless human and therefor self tormented and die miserable despite their filthy riches. Dot Com.
posted by nanojath at 9:36 AM on May 18, 2006


As Mckee turns out, that's the crux of the 'if only....' i.e. we wish it weren't so. Plus, these pieces undermine the rhetoric of freedom (for markets, not people) and desire (for objects, not happiness.)

Check out the "absurdly dysfunctional" link for a longer account of the work. Here's another gem:

"In the wake of the speculation-driven Internet bubble, the phrase "dot-com" already appears as an artifact of a ruined utopia, testimony to the destructive boom-bust cycle inherent to deregulated markets."

But yeah, "life sucks and then you die" is enough to summarize the point.
posted by anotherpanacea at 9:54 AM on May 18, 2006


argh... points out, not turns.
posted by anotherpanacea at 9:56 AM on May 18, 2006




Given the rate of small charachter string URL usage, in the near future all URLs will look like that.
posted by sourwookie at 12:32 PM on May 18, 2006


I saw Thorne's It's Not My Memory of It some time back and liked it a great deal. With this work, I agree that it's a bit shallow. Also, RFC 1035 limits domains to 65 characters, so none of the domains I've seen could be used on the actual internet.
posted by whir at 1:10 PM on May 18, 2006


So if I take my otherwise generic and rambling slogan and put a www. on the front and a .com on the end, it becomes art? Keen!
posted by davros42 at 1:30 PM on May 18, 2006


life sucks die magazine.
posted by nanojath at 1:44 PM on May 18, 2006


davros42, it's www.soifitakemyotherwisegenericandramblingsloganandputa wwwonthefrontandadotcomontheenditbecomesartkeen.com
posted by nanojath at 1:46 PM on May 18, 2006


pffftttt .... high brow lit crit shit complete with some sort of manifesto ...you cant do this to me after the Wiggles thread. Im gonna paste their urls into Tinyurl and be done with them ....
posted by celerystick at 9:24 PM on May 18, 2006


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